The Power of Zero

I read this morning in my beloved (being sarcastic here) TOI, that the English language will soon have a million words in it. A million ways to express yourself, a million permutations of syllables that homo sapiens can produce to convey their needs, desires, achievements, gripes, joys and twisted thoughts and emotions. “One million?” I thought. “So few? I was expecting at least 10 million”. One million seemed too mundane a mark for human vocabulary, considering the many colourful ways we adopt to express ourselves...

But then, I remembered an anecdote that my mechanical-engineer-turned-physics-professor dad had related to me nearly eight years ago. It was during one of those physics-and-math conversations that would go on to mould my eager and observant mind into a deep chalice to hold the wine of the sciences.

Allow me to reproduce the anecdote. I know I can’t do justice to the way Pop had related it, but it’s my best shot.

God always plans our lifespan and sends us down to earth. Nothing you do can change or postpone the day you die, because He always bestows a lifespan on every creature before sending him/her/it to earth. He has a secretary that makes a note of the lifespan in his register (well, I was 11, I bought it). And the age is always recorded in seconds. God likes to be accurate, you know.

So for most people, God commands: “2 into 10 raised to 9 seconds. Tathastu!”. (We calculated how much that would be… turns out that it’s equivalent to 63.5 years nearly). And his secretary writes it down in his register against your soul number. Only then would the person would move down the production line and take birth on Earth. He’d live a happy, wholesome life and at the 2000000000^th second (nine zeros), exactly as recorded in the register, the person would drop dead. The system works like clockwork.

Now, one day, the secretary had had a bad morning at home with his wife before reporting for duty. Work for the day started and God said “2 into 10 raised to 9 seconds. Tathastu!” and sent his creature down to Earth. The secretary recorded “2 into 10 raised to ‘8’ seconds” instead of '9'. (For the uninitiated, he’d hacked off one zero from the person’s lifetime.)

“So?” I’d asked pop in indignation. “Let’s calculate how long the person lived”, replied Pop. And to my wide-eyed kiddie astonishment, the poor person ended up living for just 6.35 years! He died a kid! All because the stupid secretary missed a zero!

And the lesson about exponents of ten was learnt. You need to be careful while dealing with them! Sometimes the immensely profoundly gigantically gargantuan figures might seem like a trifle. (I have a new word for that... immhugargoprofound... What! I'm doing my bit in bringing the one million mark closer...)

And I still don’t know whether the secretary is still on the job up there after making such a fatal error… You never know… He must have got a job at some Indian government office because of his God-father…